by Archie » 20 Jun 2017, 3:41 pm
I don't know the places up north myself, but, if you go into the NSW DPI website, and login to online licence holder services, there is a section marked "Public Land Harvest Species Reports"; this is towards the bottom, it's not the "Public Land Harvest Return" section nearer the top.
That then gives you access to quarterly reports for each region by forest and species. Although fair warning, one, a lot of forests rarely see licenced hunters and two, people being people, not everyone is terribly honest when they fill the reports in - and that goes triple for when they find deer. There are definitely forests with deer that don't have harvest returns showing it. But hopefully anyway it gives you a clue. Just know that if a forest shows as being empty it may be:
1/ empty
2/ not empty but hasn't been visited by a licenced hunter who filled in a return for that quarter
3/ not empty but visited by people that drove all around the fire trails in a ute, didn't see anything because they'd scared it off, and then called it empty
So don't get too discouraged if your local forests show empty, you may just need to put in the legwork to prove it one way or the other.